Week 20: 16-20 January 2023

I was relentlessly positive this week. I could guess about the reasons. I was motivated by addressing the results of the People Survey. I was excited about a couple of important procurements that we’re starting. I was looking forward to the inception workshop for the Technical Design Authority. But it was also because I decided to be positive. I nearly slipped back. There was a moment in bed on Monday morning. But even when something didn’t go well it didn’t knock me off my stride.

I also felt the gentle pressure of important and imminent deadlines this week: on Wednesday preparing for our pre market engagement event on the application support contract for the case management system (CMS); on Thursday to prepare for our market engagement event on the service desk as well as the frequent pull of the inbox.

The Service Desk event was really well attended, though we shared a recording for suppliers unable to attend at relatively short notice. The feedback will help us unblock one of the issues we’d been grappling with which had delayed us initiating the bidding process. Generally I think more, smaller engagement points with suppliers will help us learn more and adapt.

Despite all of that, I still had time to do things well. I thought carefully about how we’d do the inception workshop. I needed a format that would support us being user-centric and fit the findings from the book reviews into the design of how we’d work together. And it needed a bit of movement in an otherwise sterile basement room. I realised I’d asked everyone else to read something and not prepared anything myself and was worried that might seem unduly hierarchical, so worked my way through The Habit of Excellence by Lt Col Langley Sharp – which reinforced a significant number of the key messages from the other texts.

I also began the process of digging in to our People Survey results through some good conversations with colleagues to explore what we need to stop and start doing differently.

With a different shape and size portfolio previously I felt I didn’t have the chance to invest the same level of effort; that I was constantly doing things ‘just well enough’.

I also tried to do some smaller things differently. A meeting on Monday was scheduled to look at the strengths and weaknesses of managing our hosting contract directly. Rather than meet and then draft a doc, I asked us to develop a document in realtime. Not everyone experienced that in the same way, but it was good to show people how a different approach can have benefits.

I didn’t do enough to move forward the tech strategy and roadmap this week. Whilst it’s not one of my four priorities for next week, we are beginning a set of engagement strategies for colleagues within the department so that’ll give me the excuse to find more time ahead of an event that TechUK will be hosting for us in February.

So my four priorities for next week are to:

  1. Use the feedback from the Service Desk to initiate the procurement
  2. Help the first substantive meeting of the TDA work in the way we’ve co-designed
  3. Identify a Product Owner to support the development of our Future Casework Tools proof of concept
  4. Enable our leadership team to design the response to our People Survey results